WBI Founders

Our 17 Year Record

From June 1997 until the present, the Namies have led the first and only U.S. organization dedicated to the eradication of workplace bullying that combines help for individuals via our websites & over 10,000 consultations, telephone coaching, conducting & popularizing scientific research, authoring books, producing education DVDs, leading training for professionals-unions-employers, coordinating national legislative advocacy, and providing consulting solutions for organizations. We proudly helped create the U.S. Academy of Workplace Bullying, Mobbing & Abuse.

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Posts Tagged ‘CEO’

The NFL — the No Effin’ Liability league for the boys of football — has struck again. As a multi-billion dollar enterprise (owned by revered American entrepreneurs — celebrities themselves who own celebrity labor), the league of owners of American professional football has shown itself to be incredibly inept. Their mouthpiece, the “commish” Roger Goodell seems driven solely to protect the NFL brand. He certainly is not a competent CEO though paid $44.2 million per year to be incompetent. I’m not sure he could work the drive-thru at McDonalds — it’s too fast moving and accuracy matters.

You see Roger got caught crafting corporate policy in a very public way, then revising it to be more punitive publicly, only to get caught acting unilaterally and reflexively, all the while completely ignoring his own stated “policy.” The man doesn’t know “strategery,”willing to act without thinking.

Ray Rice, star player for the Baltimore Ravens, was caught on a New Jersey casino hotel security video entering an elevator with this then-fiance, Janay Palmer. That same camera caught him dragging an unconscious Janay from the elevator minutes later.

Conclusion to be drawn by any reasonable person: Rice struck Palmer in the elevator. Local law enforcement, the district attorney and the judge seemed to believe an unknown third person must have assaulted her in the elevator. Charges were dismissed. The NFL also engaged in such magical thinking. Goodell was allowed to assume that if the courts didn’t care to protect Palmer and jail Rice, the Ravens and NFL had little to worry about. And the only worry for the team and league is LEGAL liability. Just protect the shield, baby (tip to Al Davis).

Goodell decided that he had better punish Rice in some way. He grazed him with a 2-game suspension. Even within the NFL’s hierarchy of punishments, the penalty was light as compared to a pot smoking 6-game suspension. The inequity was obvious to all immediately but not to Goodell. Weeks later, he publicly declared that a domestic violence first-time violation committed by a player (nothing said about the distinction between proof, accusation, arrest, indictment or conviction) would draw a 6-game penalty. What to do with Rice retroactively? Suddenly two new domestic violence cases emerged with San Francisco and Carolina players. What to do? Goodell waited.

Into the breach strode that paragon of journalism, TMZ, with the missing link — video from the elevator. At last, Goodell could see what had actually happened between the video sequences taken outside the elevator. He rapidly, within the day, compelled the Ravens team to fire Rice and the NFL suspended Rice indefinitely (which in the past has always been the route to redemption and restoral of playing privileges).

Goodell expected praise. Instead, there have been calls for his head. ESPN talking head, attorney, and former NFL quarterback Steve Young opined that the Ravens should have acted like a responsible corporate employer and sent Rice home without pay pending an investigation.

I’ll let ESPN’s Keith Olbermann explain why Goodell and the Ravens and county officials screwed up. He calls for mass resignations. Obermann says Goodell “comforted the violent and afflicted the victim” and is an “enabler of men who beat women.”

As an institution, the NFL is screwy. The people in charge seem incapable of owning the responsibility for what they have done. It’s all deflection and denial. Just protect the shield, baby.

We reported in late July about the long-standing feud between second generation owners of the Market Basket grocery store chain in the Northeast. Arthur S. Demoulas fired his cousin Artie T. Workers rose in support because he had done several costly things to help financially strapped workers when the stock market collapse ate up retirement savings. Local politicians called for boycotts of the stores. Shelves ran bare. Governors in two states pled for a solution.

Now, Artie T.’s offer to buy the chain, to remove Artie S., has been accepted by the Board. Artie T. will restore all lost jobs. Artie S. had fired protestors.

The President of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) is calling on Boeing CEO Jim McNerney to apologize to Boeing’s workforce for offensive remarks made during a quarterly earning call with reporters on July 23, 2014.

“The heart will still be beating, the employees will still be cowering, I’ll be working hard,” said McNerney in response to a reporter’s question about whether he had plans to retire after he turns 65 next month. Boeing’s policy is for executives to retire at age 65.

McNerney is ranked #126 on the Forbes list of CEO compensation earning $13.36 million per year.

“Boeing’s CEO would have been far better served to give credit to the workforce that has driven the company’s sales and profits to record levels,” said IAM President Tom Buffenbarger. “Instead, his unfunny and unnecessary remarks serve as reminder that the Jack Welch style of anti-personnel management is still alive and well at Boeing. If he is able to get his foot out of his mouth, the very next thing we hear from Mr. McNerney should be a sincere apology to all employees at Boeing.”

The IAM and Boeing have a contentious relationship with Boeing always threatening IAM with shutting down production plants and moving to anti-union states (as they did for one plant moving to South Carolina from Washington state).

On that same Friday, McNerney issued an apology distributed companywide. He said the comment made during a call about the company’s quarterly results was a “joke gone bad.”

Lately, austerity implies demands for sacrifice by others but never by those calling for the austerity. On the international level, it is Germany, the IMF, and the World Bank telling Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland to make their people sacrifice job stability and promised pensions and to sell off public services to profiteering multinational corporations. Within organizations here in the U.S., austerity becomes an excuse to increase the gap between executives (the feudal masters) and non-managerial workers (the serfs, slaves, indentured servants).

Despite the recession, businesses are free to hoard money without sharing the wealth with employees. American corporations are holding a record $1.24 TRILLION. That stash is the equivalent of hiring 3.5 million people for five years at an annual salary of $40,000. To add disgrace to insult, American corporations are holding 57% of their cash outside the U.S. to escape taxation.